Slim Beaumont

Walter "Slim" Beaumont (died 1989) was Sheriff of Sinclair Parish, Louisiana during the 1960s. He was notorious for being a white supremacist (violating civil rights laws by attempting to keep his parish all-white through various illegal methods), an ally of the Louisiana political machine and the Ku Klux Klan, and for overseeing rampant corruption in the police department. Beaumont was arrested in 1968 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, and he was released after 12; he was murdered at his home in 1989 by unknown perpetrators.

Biography
Walter Beaumont was born in Sinclair Parish, Louisiana to a Louisiana Creole family, and he joined the Sinclair Parish Sheriff's Department as a young man. Beaumont was an open white supremacist who acquired powerful friends in the state government and the Southern Union branch of the Ku Klux Klan, and they financed his election as Sheriff during the 1960s. Known affectionately to his constituents as "Slim", Beaumont sought to keep his parish white by using harassment, intimidation, and even murder against African-American residents and travellers, and he continued to act as if Jim Crow was still the law of the land. In 1968, he murdered civil rights activist Ezekiel Dandridge to prevent him from gathering evidence of his corruption, and Beaumont stole the folder of evidence that Dandridge had compiled against him. He then began a campaign of witness intimidation using the names from the list, but Lincoln Clay and Roxy Laveau stirred up enough trouble to distrach the police as Mitch Decosta evacuated the remaining witnesses to safety. Beaumont tracked Clay down to the Decosta family farm and captured him and the evidence, but Clay's allies rescued him and shot their way through the parish deputies before capturing Beaumont. Clay and his associates then turned him over to the authorities, as killing him would do nothing; instead, they submitted the evidence against him, turning a small-town corruption case into national news. He named over a dozen co-conspirators in his department, including members of the Louisiana political machine and Southern Union members. He accepted a sentence of 15 years in prison, and he served only 12 years, most of it in solitary confinement for his safety. In 1989, he was shot and killed in the driveway of his home, and no perpetrator was ever identified or arrested.